How to draw a Personal Budget that works

Many people spend their little income haphazardly without any planning and end up getting broke before month-end. They then borrow to make ends meet and end up with more problems that they fail to repay their debts promptly.

However, this is not a prudent way of managing your personal financial affairs. Planning your personal financial affairs through prioritization of needs and budgeting income and expenses is the best way to achieving success in managing your financial affairs.

It is important first to assess your financial needs in the short, medium and long term. What are your financial objectives? What do you want to achieve in the course of time? Do you have any targets? What are your short. medium and long term needs? List all of them down.

Next categorize income and expenses on a monthly basis. Then prioritize expenses into most important, important and most important. You can use any other weighting or prioritization formula that works best for you.

After this assess costs based on consumption per month. Put figures to the expense items. Then write down your income sources and the amount you earn per month from them. List the income on the left and the expenses on the right. Add up income amounts against expense amounts and find the difference to determine surplus or deficit.

Once you have added and reduced items and figures several times and you are finally satisfied with the results, type your figures on a computer spreadsheet or word processor table and save it. You may also print it and file it for regular reference.

To make it work successfully for you, you must vow to stick to the budget. Any deviation must be absolutely necessary and funds should be made available separately to meet the extra expenditure. Where no funds are available, some cutbacks or borrowing from other expense votes. You should ensure that you refund any funds borrowed from any expense votes to enable the votes to be expended.

To be frank, most people would want to spend more and more irrespective of their financial ability. However, arbitrary unbudgeted spending may be hazardous to your financial health.